Xbee communicate, distance messurement

Projects Networking, Protocols, and Devices
1

Hi

Does anyone have some ideas or codes of distance mesurements between 2 Xbee modules ?
The idee is to light up some led's in function of the distance between the 2 arduino uno's with xbee ?

Thanks

2

Depending on how the XBees are communicating, you may be able to get the RSSI (relative signal strength indicator) value. Do not expect that the value will mean diddly, though. The distance between the two devices is in no way a linear relationship between the two devices.

3

Hi

  1. With the setup of one of our xbee modules we get some errors (see image) we have tried to restore it this did not really help.
    http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/268/errorpd.png

Our objective is to messure if our arduino's are close to eachother or far indicated by led's
we see 2 options to do this
1- by messuring packet loss
2- by messuring signal strenght

what do you think ?
thanks verry much

4

That is the last time I will ever click on a shitshack link. Damn spam.

what do you think ?

I don't think either method will tell you anything about the absolute distance. The R in RSSI might as well stand for random. It is an approximate indication of the strength of the signal, which is affected by distance, noise, and what's in the way (or how many surfaces the signal reflected off of).

The XBee drops packets, and retries sending them. It loses packets because of interference, distance, obstructions, reflected signals interfering with each other, and for a variety of other reasons.

Neither method you propose, or any of the other methods any one else has proposed has ever translated into an easy to use method of determining distance between sender and receiver.

But, don't let me stop you from trying. Perhaps you WILL discover a useful, reliable, repeatable, linear method, and the (Arduino) world will thank you.